Small breather....

Talked to Bruce just a bit ago: he told me to go away and not think about any of this until Tuesday. Well, if he insists.

The office staff were amazingly patient and helpful--all of them. I'm getting gifts for them. I know how to keep people on my side--and I know that the office staff can be angels or obstructive as hell, depending on how well they like a person. Not only will I go to great lengths not to piss them off, I'll drench them in butter, just to make my own life easier.

It was nice when one of them said, "You're getting good at this, Tonia." And I must say, by end of day today, it did feel like I finally was getting the hang of things--now that I'm essentially done with it. I will check in with Bruce on Tuesday (at his request), but that'll be easy as pie. (Which rather begs the question: how easy is pie? It's not necessarily easy to make, though it is easy to eat. Strange expression.)

But from a completely different angle, most of the work I had to do has pretty frightening implications. We opened something like 20 new sections of remedial (excuse me, "developmental") comp and canceled close to 10 sections of first-semester, credit bearing comp. Some of this may be attributable to the new (and loathed) computerized testing system--which gives higher marks for florid yet meaningless sentences than it does for pithy ones--but the Placement coordinator said that a lot of the students were, in fact, being correctly placed into the 001 classes. And that's scary. What is happening in their educations prior to us that makes so very many of them incapable of writing at the basic level we expect for their entry into the credit-bearing classes? We sure as hell are not holding the bar very high, and they still can't get over it.

All the more reason I'm grateful I'm staying away from 101 for a while. Maybe forever. As far as I'm concerned, 101 classes are a perfect storm of things guaranteed to drive me bat-shit: students who are generally not very good readers or writers, pretty poor thinkers, and have absolutely no idea how to behave appropriately in the academic culture. I get enough of that in 102, after they've had at least one semester to learn how it all works. Come to think of it, I get enough of it in the lit electives.

For years I've thought I'd like to do in-service days with English teachers in area middle schools and high schools, looking at the difference between what they have to do to meet the requirements of the school board (and standardized testing) and what we want from the kids once they get to our doors. I don't know how to bridge that gap, but just doing some consciousness raising might be a step in the right direction.

Some other life, perhaps. Other things are higher on my personal list of priorities.

Speaking of priorities, I don't know what I want to do with the rest of today. I'm very tired and very hungry and my brains are decidedly swiss cheezy. Whatever I'm going to do, however, I'm not going to do it here. Take your Crayolas and color me gone....